ARIES: Intergalactic Customer Service
by Akktri
Summary: Strangely sexual adventures involving an intergalactic telecommunications company connected to Planet Pandora and other fictional worlds.
1. Chapter 1: Indecent Exposure

When I woke up on Monday morning, I was standing naked in a clump of weeds behind someone's apartment, and I had to explain to a police officer why I had stripped off my clothes and shot a cat with a makeshift bow and arrow, roasting it on an unapproved fire behind my apartment.

Actually, that was easy to explain compared to the part where I was caught masturbating on top of the stone retaining wall in front of my building.

I could only tell him that I had sleepwalking episodes and I didn't know what I was doing.

Considering the fact that I had no idea how I got thigh high in the weeds along the road cut behind Building 12, the man believed me and let me go with a warning.

I had sleepwalked naked for several blocks, somehow avoiding the rocks, trash and broken beer bottles that littered the streets and sidewalks.

I had been dreaming the whole time.

Dreaming about blue cat people.

Just like in Disney's _Avatar_.

The funny thing is, the dream didn't correspond to anything I had done.

The night before, I went to bed wearing a polo shirt and shorts. I had underwear on.

That's what I normally do. I wasn't sleeping commando.

I was inside my apartment with the deadbolt securely locked. The lights were out, the darkness concealing the ugly beige colored walls, the beat-up old dressers inherited from family members, the tiny kitchen that stood directly opposite the bed.

I've heard of people who sleepwalked into their kitchens to cook hamburgers. Why couldn't I have been one of those? I could have used the extra weight.

But no. I had to be a cat person.

Sunday night, I was sprawled on my piece of crap bed with no headboard or footboard, basically a mattress on wheels, laying on a cheap bedspread that always comes off in the middle of the night, and when I closed my eyes, I saw palm branches and some big Saturn-like planet filling up the sky.

When I raised my hand to rub my face, I noticed it was blue, and my face felt wrong.

It appeared I was lying in some sort of jungle. Millipedes the diameter of PVC piping crawled over the leaves, gnawing on tree barks while hairless cyclops squirrels chased each other across the branches, extending colorful dorsal fins in a kind of mating ritual.

I sat up and discovered I was blue, I had a tail, and wore nothing but a loincloth.

The spots and dreadlocks told me everything.

I was dreaming about _that movie_.

Yeah, I know, there _was_ sort of a connection to reality, but I didn't actually touch myself. I only lifted the loincloth to see what I had down there, because they never showed that part in the movie.

It turns out Avatar genitals look like fins with a row of small orifices running down its edge. In lieu of testicles, I suppose,I had a pair of tubular growths dangling around the fin like dead snakes.

I covered up again, scratching at insect bites incurred from lying in a dirty pestilence laden jungle.

When I felt a painful burning itch beneath my loincloth, I suddenly realized that one of the blue lumps attached to my fin had black legs, and set about removing it at once.

If you've lived in the Midwest as long as I have, and know something about the country, you know how to avoid Lyme Disease. Therefore, I thought it a good idea to not let the thing burrow its head into my body, my cat's claws seeming to be handy enough for crushing the though little exoskeleton. It bled green.

This is a far cry from self pleasuring anything in a parking lot.

I put the flap back down and stood up, taking in my surroundings with anxious dread.

A spear lay propped against a nearby tree, which I quickly retrieved to protect myself against...whatever.

Following this, I spent the greater portion of an hour getting lost.

I was surrounded by oddly shaped multicolored jungle plants, the majority appearing to be poisonous or otherwise unsafe for consumption.

I was hungry. Starved, even, but I didn't kill any kitty cats.

Instead, I encountered a female figure weeping into the bark of a tree.

Blue, of course. Naked except for a thin draping of beads and a loincloth. Her breasts were slight, so the former part didn't matter that much.

I crept closer. "Hello?"

She sniffed and turned to face me. Blue spotty feline face. Yellow eyes. The usual.

Well, not so usual in the fact that her eyes were cloudy looking, like she were in need of (no pun intended) cataract surgery.

The face and body were plump, in sharp contrast to those stick figures they had in the film.

"Hi," I stammered, I nervously raising a hand. "I, uh, _I see you_?"

"I'm sorry," she said in a half sob. "I don't see much of anything."

The words were spoken in a foreign language, but my brain interpreted them as English.

I repressed a chuckle. "It's okay. Being, uh, visually impaired is no big deal. There's even a surgical procedure for that, I think."

She just stared, not comprehending.

"They can cut it out?"

She covered her face in terror. "No! No knives!"

"Uh, it's not a knife. It's a special type of light."

She dropped her hands. "Are you a sorcerer?"

"No," I laughed. "I'm not even a doctor. But a doctor could help you."

"Where is this doctor that you speak of?"

I shrugged. "I don't know. I can't promise anything, but I'll try to find one for you. Somehow."

"Do you believe in love at first sight?" she asked me.

When I said no, she tackled me to the ground and kissed me so wildly that I had to struggle to avoid suffocation.

The movie didn't specifically state this, but Avatar dreadlocks have a life of their own, and soon our hair was joined together.

All at once, I found myself being overwhelmed with bursts of foreign emotion.

I caught a vision of the female being shunned from her tribe due to her disability, her family and friends turning their backs on her due to some barbaric aboriginal custom.

I felt the pain, the hurt, then a wave of pathetic neediness that crossed the borders of codependency.

This telepathic communication must have cut both ways, for she seemed to notice my shudders of revulsion and my churning stomach, removing her mouth from my lips.

"I am sorry," she cried. "I have been dependent on others ever since I have lost my sight. Now that I have sexually matured, I have been shunned, and now have no one!"

She dampened my chest with her tears as she blasted my mind with images of future death and rejection.

I just frowned as I thought about striped canes and Lasik surgery, and old blind men in Kung Fu movies kicking ass.

She seemed to get what I was sending, for she chuckled at that, and when I thought of Chillee Willie the penguin and The Terminator saying `chill out', she smiled.

And then she starts kissing me again.

"I love you," she said in between tongueings.

"I barely know you!" I gasped.

"We have made T'sailu," she grinned. "That makes us close friends."

"I thought T'sailu was when you had sex," I muttered.

She blinked several times when I mentally recalled the scene from the film when they had hair sex.

"But that's all wrong!" she said. "You know nothing!"

"Enlighten me," I said.

"What we are doing right now, it is T'sailu Wacnop. No child is produced by it. For T'sailu Qubrunt, our queues must be connected in another way, as well as our bodies..."

She ran her fingers down her flat chest. "If it pleases you."

I wasn't quite sure at this point, but my fin certainly was. Images from the film flashed through my mind once more. The bit where he gets beaten up for sleeping with the alien.

"What are these? Hallucinations? They are so vivid."

I thought about Lasik again. "It's from the same place," I said vaguely.

"You are a god," she said with wide eyed amazement.

"Not exactly."

And then I sent her a flash of me in the hospital after getting hit by a car.

"Oh...regardless, I love you."

And she resumes kissing me.

A tail slips under my loincloth as she unties her own, throwing it into the bushes.

Instead of a vagina, she had sort of a narrow fleshy vacuum cleaner attachment lined with worm-like wigging hairs.

I shudder as she straddles my naked stomach, but she just sends me blasts of sexual excitement, easing the little mouth with the squirming worms onto my fin.

Instead of experiencing T'sailu Qubrunt, I wake up naked in the weeds behind an electrical transformer servicing Building 12 at The Maples apartment complex, red and blue lights flashing at me while a cop and a dark skinned fat woman point and mutter to one another as they stare at me.

Not wanting to get poison ivy, though I probably already had some already, I didn't bother making a covering for myself. I just stood and waited for the cop to come over.

He was a thick necked, red faced man with freckles and crew cut blonde hair.

The first thing out of his mouth was, "Sir, where are your clothes?"

I shrugged. "I don't know."

His eyes narrowed. "What do you mean, `you don't know'?"

"Just what I said," I persisted. "The last thing I remember is going to bed."

He sighed, smirking a little. "Do you sleepwalk often?"

With a frown, I said, "Not really."

Cops don't like vague answers. "Please clarify, sir."

It came out sounding like an order.

I swallowed. "Two weeks ago, I woke up naked in the bathtub. But that was it."

It's hard to lie to a cop. One look was all it took for me to break down and tell him my history of sleepwalking in my parents' house. How I sleep shot and cooked the neighbor's cat and carved a map of the suburb on my closet door.

"Sir," he said at last. "Did you know that you urinated on a silver Mercury owned by a Juan Hernandez?"

I could see he was forcing down a laugh.

I gulped. "Can you tell the guy I was sleepwalking?"

"I think he knows," the cop smirked. "Lucky for you, he had a good sense of humor about it."

He dropped his mirth. "Mrs. Adderson's cat, however..."

And then he lists all the crazy things I have no recollection about, the fire, the waking of neighbors with strange animal calls, the masturbating.

He put away his little notebook.

"I'm going to let you off with a warning this time. See a doctor. See a psychiatrist. Chain yourself to the bed. I don't care. Just don't let it happen again or I'll be forced to take you downtown."

I sighed, nodding my head vigorously.

"Thank you, officer."

He gave me a curt nod. "Do me a favor and get some fucking clothes on."


	2. Chapter 2: Sleep Study

Obviously, I couldn't continue this practice of sleepwalking naked around my apartment complex, so I scheduled an appointment for my psychologist for the following Wednesday.

I really wanted to go in there sooner than that, but they were booked, so I went to work as usual, then grudgingly spent that night on the couch in my parents' house.

The next day I had the appointment, and it wasn't pretty.

"He's been sleepwalking again," mom was telling Dr. Galwyn. "Last night, after peeing on the living room rug, he ate an entire bucket of ice cream, threw up, then climbed up on the roof in his underwear, howling at the moon and waking up everyone in the house."

I didn't deny it. Whenever I dreamed of the blue people, things happened. One time I found myself standing naked on the sidewalk, one hand fondling my privates, the other clutching the barbecued remains of the neighbor's cat. I spent a week in Western Mental, where everything is white and you're not allowed any sharp objects.

I've gone to see Dr. Galwyn more times than I can count. He's the shrink I go to when you can't afford a good one. He didn't cure anything. I take sedatives every night, but they don't help at all. In fact, they make it worse.

Dr. Galwyn was a bald slack jawed black man half a head shorter than me. His face always looks happy, but I wonder if it's forced.

The decor in his office consisted of carefully chosen artifacts reflecting a doctoral education in psychology. _Where the Wild Things Are_, due to its relevance to children's Freudian psychology. A Picasso due to its subjective interpretation. Escher due to his effective trickery of human visual perception. A bust of Freud. A framed autographed picture of Philp G. Zimbardo. Educational toys.

The desk had photographs of family to establish the doctor's emotional stability, more than likely a facade.

He asked me about the dreams again, and I told him what I told him before. I hunted weird animals in an alien jungle. I had sex, which somehow involved heavy use of dreadlocked hair. I rode on the back of a giant leathery pterodactyl thing.

The doctor thinks it's something to do with me not having a girlfriend and watching Disney's _Avatar_ too much, but I'm not really that big a fan. I mean, If I didn't like the movie, why would I unconsciously fantasize about it to this extent?

For that matter, why did I have dreams like that _before_ _the movie was even made?_

This argument got me nowhere, though. The moment I said something, the doctor theorized that I actually had been dreaming about similar but not identical things before the movie came out, and now it just happens to coincide with the film. They also all seemed to agree that the movie actually came out in the year 2000, which allowed them to attribute my sleepwalking activity to the film for an additional nine years.

As we conversed in his little office decorated with musty psychology books the doctor has probably never read, he recommended an MRI.

So then I went to the hospital.

The MRI room at Research Medical was a spotless cube with a giant boxy machine dating back to the late 1970's, an item too expensive to replace, but not outdated enough to suffer a forced retirement. I had no metal body parts to shield me from the stupidity, so I allowed them to sedate me.

They secured me to a table with straps and shoved me inside the chrome tube until I drifted off.

When my eyes opened again, I found myself in the arms of a bony blue female, my fin stuck inside her vacuum cleaner attachment.

It wasn't the one with the cataracts.

I wasn't sure exactly what had transpired, but since I didn't think any of it was real, I allowed myself to enjoy it.

We were wrapped in a hammock dangling an uncomfortably long distance from the ground, secured only by a couple tethers hooked to a giant tree. About ten others hung around us, each containing sleeping blue things.

Our hair was connected, so the moment I thought about the half blind female, and how desirable her plumpness was, I got slapped.

If I hadn't been the one on the bottom, she might have simply tossed me overboard, but as it were inconvenient, she instead opted for disengaging herself and leaping off into the branches.

Left to my own devices, I grabbed hold of one end of the hammock and clambered my way over to the tree, trying not to look down.

If I were my normal self, I probably would have fallen to my death, but I wasn't, so I got across to a branch, threw my chest over it, and lay there panting for several minutes.

Somehow, I managed to climb down to the green forest floor below, seeing no sign of anyone else aside from the sleeping forms in the other hammocks, not even tools or dwellings.

Sure, I suppose I could have sought out others of my own kind and tried to fit in the tribe, but I didn't exactly want to be there in the first place, so instead I tried to sneak off and explore the jungle, maybe find someone with a pizza.

I crossed through a thicket and found myself slamming into the female with the cataracts.

"Hi!" I stammered, apologizing profusely.

She giggled. "Hello stranger."

"So what's your name?" I asked.

"Purriga," she smiled.

"Jason."

And then she was kissing me and connecting our hair.

When she saw what I did with the other female, she pulled away, disconnected our hair, and slapped me, stomping away.

"Purriga!" I cried. "Wait!"

But before I could catch up to her, I woke up, finding myself surrounded by people in lab coats muttering things about my nocturnal disorder.

When they removed my restraints, I found red marks on my wrists and ankles where I had fought to pull myself out of the machine, and someone remarked that I had been yelling incoherently in a foreign language.

Then I was sitting in a small examination room a couple doors down. My doctor through all this process was a smooth talking jerk with slicked back hair and gleaming teeth.

"We're going to try an experimental dream suppressant," the doctor was saying. "It's called Hypnocil. We'll start off on thirty five milligram tabs and see what that does to you."

I rolled my eyes. The last time I tried an `experimental' drug like that, I nearly flunked college. The biology teacher came up to my desk and made jokes about me sleeping in class. I'd open a history textbook in a hard plastic chair in the cafeteria, and sleep through Spanish. I ruined five sheets of expensive framing material in art class because I didn't realize you cut the material with the sharp side of the knife. Why did I cut with the dull side? Because of Paxil.

Unfortunately, I had no choice. I couldn't afford to go to jail for indecent exposure. Something had to be done, or I'd never be able to move out and have a productive life.

So the doctor scribbles something on a pad, and then I'm taking Hypnocil every night before bed.

The dreams seemed to stop after that, and I could finally get on with my life.

Or so I thought.

Each night when I closed my eyes, everything felt normal.

I took my pills, slept a dreamless sleep, and woke up in my bed.

At the end of the week, however, I awoke with my clothes on backwards, and my left hand was clutching a pair of women's panties.


	3. Chapter 3: Martinez Auto Body

I frowned at the smooth little triangle of fabric with dread, hoping and praying that I had merely sleep pilfered it from the laundry.

My apartment is on the bottom floor of Building 1, right across the hall from a pair of quarter fed washer and drier units. People at the apartment were always leaving their clothes in the drier all night, I was thinking. Maybe I just opened the drier and swiped someone's panties.

My hopes were dashed when I noticed a little card with lipstick stains safety pinned to the crotch.

A phone number had been written on it with a wide cursive font, followed by two small words:

"Call me."

Below this, someone had written:

"XOXOXOXXO".

I flipped the card over. Although obscured by lipstick kisses, I could still read the name of a company, its address, and a business telephone.

"Martinez Auto Body," it said. "Juan Martinez, General Manager."

I sat up with a start, oddly terrified and horny at the same time.

Who was this woman who gave me her panties?

Was it even a woman?

And what else had she given me before she left me with her panties?

Despite the Hispanic sounding business card, I had no idea what race or nationality this person was, or if they were single or married.

It was that last part that made me break into a cold sweat.

That, and wondering who the hell Juan Martinez was.

Deciding I didn't want anything to do with...whoever this was, I dangled the panties over the trash can next to the stove.

Before I could resign it to its burial among old hamburger packages and wadded Kleenex, I changed my mind.

It seemed this woman had protected me from an indecent exposure arrest, possibly worse. Of this I was almost one hundred percent certain. That fact alone made her deserving of _at least a little_ of my affection already.

I hadn't had a girlfriend for years. If this wasn't a hooker, it might possibly be the best thing that has happened to me in a long time. And so I instead laid it on my bed and stared at it.

Having it thus situated, I started my normal morning routine, exercising, showering, eating breakfast, all the while contemplating the meaning of these strange panties.

As I chewed on a Pop Tart, I decided that the mystery woman was indeed Hispanic, since ninety percent of the people in The Maples were Hispanic, and, again, a Hispanic name was on the card.

I had taken four semesters of Spanish in college, but couldn't make it work for me on the telephone with customers.

Still, despite not knowing how to talk money with Latinos, I did know how to make small talk. If some hot Mexican Lolita wanted to be my girlfriend, I would gladly let her.

The thought had me excited until I was digging into my Corn Bran Crunch, wherein I started wondering how hideous this woman could truly be, and what age group she could belong to.

Judging by the size and shape of the drawers, Mystery Woman was somewhere above the age of thirteen and not morbidly obese. Whether or not this woman was a grandmother or jail bait was difficult to determine.

I couldn't even be certain that Martinez Auto Body was her place of employment. It could have merely been a card she'd grabbed at random from some restaurant hallway.

I didn't even have a name to go on.

I ate a few more bites of my cereal, then grabbed my cel phone, dialing the first half of the telephone number scrawled on the back of the card.

I lost my nerve and pushed the hang up button.

I put the phone back on its charger and stuffed the panties into the sock drawer of my dresser, resolving to not think about it again.

I finished breakfast, got my things together for work, and stepped out the door.

The moment I set foot in the outside hallway, the smell of wood smoke hit my nostrils and I froze.

Apparently, I had been busy last night.

In the stretch of carpeting between my apartment and the laundry room, the smoldering remains of a fire slowly burned a hole to the concrete beneath.

On either side of the fire, mounds of clothing and leaves had been piled together like sleeping palettes, and in the middle, the skeletal remains of a squirrel and a half eaten cat kebob.

With a sigh and a shake of my head, I knelt beside one of the palettes in search of clues.

I turned over pieces of clothing, but it didn't tell me much of anything. In fact, it only seemed to cause me new worries, for in the pile I found baby socks and a man's basketball jersey.

Next to the laundry room, there is a little closet that always seems to be overflowing with discarded clothing from people who forget to pick up their things for a week, and the stuff stays there even after they move out. I figured the stuff could either be from there, or I had just ruined the life of a family man.

As I considered it further, I decided it made no sense for a family man to leave his clothes there, or the baby, and a sniff of one article, although tainted by mildew and feminine musk, yielded the scent of Xtra Detergent.

I sighed in relief, but then shuddered as I noticed a wall covered in dirt smears out of the corner of my eye.

Dreading what I might find, I turned and found it to be a portrait of a woman, created out of ash and blood.

Despite the crude materials, it was a very good likeness, so much so that I had a sudden flashback of the real face, a face that was tan, with rounded cheeks, smooth skin, and dark hair.

The memory was gone before I could determine the ethnicity or age or anything else that could identify the woman. Well, other than the fact that she didn't have wrinkles.

Then I noticed something else. The woman had apparently left the little campsite naked.

On top of the other pile, I discovered a leather skirt, stockings, and a sleeveless pink sports top. Since I saw no bra, I guessed she hadn't left the site completely naked. But, then again, maybe she hadn't been wearing one to begin with.

The whole situation was making my head ache, and I didn't have time to sit around wondering about it, so I just hurried on up the staircase, hoping against hope that nobody associated the mess with me.

When I reached the first floor, a skinny Mexican man in a striped white shirt snickered at me as he unlocked his apartment and went inside.

What had the man seen besides me urinating on his car?

I marched out to my car, trying not to think about it.

For the duration of my thirty minute commute from the apartment to my job, I kept trying not to think about it, but I kept thinking about perfumed smells clinging to the woman's undergarment, and speculating about what kind of person owned them.

I always arrive at my job a little early, and in my distracted state, I had actually driven faster than normal.

I work at a place called NCO, a little telephone customer service and collections business out in the middle of the Kansas countryside. They handle Sprint and some other companies.

This gray cube of an office building is one of several in the semicircle of blocky concrete buildings set up around the corporate industrial complex. Outside of this to one side is an empty weed choked field, which I have occasionally explored during breaks.

It was about 5:30 in the morning, a half hour too early to start my shift, and a good twenty to thirty minutes too early for the building to open, depending on the manager on duty that day.

I was tired again, for obvious reasons. It seemed the medication hadn't helped as much as advertised. Either that, or it was like Lithium, where it takes forever to build potency, and twice as long to wear off.

The night before, while my body was...helping some woman out of her clothing, I was dreaming about mom and dad being blue cat people, and celebrating Thanksgiving in a jungle.

This I interpreted as a good sign. Instead of being a continuous, coherent narrative, my dreams were reverting back to symbols, which I hoped would translate into no sleepwalking.

As I was tearing into a turkey drumstick, an old blue skinned female creature dressed in skins came up to me with a shard of bone and stabbed me with it, cackling as she wiggled it around until blood poured out of it like a small fountain.

I fought her away and tried to run, but she kept coming after me with the bone, laughing hysterically as she stabbed me, over and over. My parents didn't try to stop her. Instead they just told me to stop being mean to grandma Mo'at.

And then I woke up with the panties in my hand.

At least _someone_ had fun.

In the deserted parking lot, I laid in the folded passenger seat of my gold four door sedan, trying to squeeze in a cat nap as a heavy rain beat a monotonous rhythm on the roof, doing its tapdance on my windows. From time to time, gusts of wind periodically slapped extra rain against the passenger glass, whistling thin notes through the window seals and cracks in the door frames.

After closing my eyes a few minutes, I sat up and checked the dashboard clock. Only eight minutes had passed. As I rolled back to a reclining position, I thought I saw motion out of the corner of my eye, but when I turned my head, I saw nothing but a wide empty stretch of pavement leading to a solitary yellow car, a grassy field, and a dilapidated barn on some farm property in the distance.

I did not see a man in a black suit. I figured that little detail was a product of my sleep problem the night before, and that I had only managed four hours of sleep, with a bathroom break in the middle. Still, I couldn't fully sleep in a car seat.

Hearing an engine, I sat up.

5:42. In my weariness, even the building seemed to be the wrong color.

I sat up, assessing the night's damage in the mirror. Unkempt red hair, bloodshot blue eyes surrounded by freckled bags. *Yeah, I'm ready for work.*

I slung my sloppily printed ID badge over my toothpaste splattered green polo.

Deciding to let the rain take care of the toothpaste, I locked up, marching into the storm.

No lightning. The sky above the gray cinder block of a building looked like a Hollywood matte painting, unnaturally bright and colorful in contrast to its shadowy surroundings. The type of sky Leonidas would scream in front of.

After pausing a moment to stare at the sky, wondering if it were computer composited, I marched up to the back entrance on one of the gray cubes, swiping my name badge across the security scanner.

I pulled on the door handle, but it didn't open. With my shirt quickly becoming a wet washcloth and my hair matting down over my eyes, I scanned my badge and tried it again. The door lock still refused to open. My watch said 5:46. I thought for certain they would be open.

Contrary to popular belief, many employee badges do not unlock a building at all hours of the day and night. When a manager wants the building locked up for the evening, they actually shut down the security lock so nobody can get in without a real key.

I gave it another tug, then frowned at the downpour blowing through the parking lot.

With a sigh, I got back in my car, waited about ten minutes, then tried the door again. The sensor light failed to turn green.

A familiar rusty gray pickup sped past, parking a few spaces down from me.

Harry, I thought. I was hoping for a manager, since they were the ones that unlocked the building.

The lights on the truck went dark and a man with white hair and a button down shirt stepped out, marching up to the building.

"Door won't open?" he yelled over the storm.

I shrugged, walking over to a nearby window.

Seeing nobody occupying the desks, and venetian blinds covering the other windows, I marched over a small hill, crossing a staircase to a window with an unobstructed view, peering at the desks near the back office.

I pressed my face against the glass and stared in there a few minutes, and as the rain poured down on my head, I saw a man in a black two piece suit walking behind the row of desks nearest the window

I'd never seen this stranger before in my life. I figured he was from Sprint's corporate headquarters, or some new manager.

I frowned, wondering if it were worth it to tap on the glass.

For some reason, the man was waving around an alarm clock like he were using it to check for radiation. It was the first of many puzzling things I would soon find out about this company.

"Is anybody in there?" I heard Harry saying over my shoulder.

"I don't know. Some weird guy with an alarm clock."

Harry peered in the window. "I don't see anything."

I frowned as I watched the suited figure hold the clock up against the various computer monitors.

"He's doing something with the computers."

"Maybe he's tech support or something."

A second later, he disappeared into a manager's tall cubicle.

"I think you're looking at a chair. It's hard to see anything in this rain."

"A moving chair?"

"Maybe I'm not looking at the right desk. Try knocking and see if he opens the door."

I hesitated, wondering if I had actually seen the man.

Harry knocked on the glass. "Hello!"

Just then the suited man came back out, sticking something on one of the phones.

A moment later, a fat bearded figure in a Star Trek shirt stepped out of a hallway near the bathrooms. Tom, the call control monitor. I guess he'd been in the bathroom or something.

I always hope that Tom will open the door, but he rarely does. I watched him anxiously as he waddled down a row of desks, oblivious to my presence as usual.

I gasped in shock as I saw him step right through the man in the suit like he wasn't there. I rubbed my eyes, trying to rationalize what I was seeing.

"Something the matter?" Harry asked.

"N-no," I stammered.

Harry's rapped on the glass again, and as he did, I blinked, and the man in the suit vanished like he'd never been there. I just stared at the empty spot with my mouth hanging open, wondering if my insanity wasn't limited to merely seeing blue people and sleepwalking.


	4. Chapter 4: Jiefito Mio

Hearing a muted beep and a click, I turned and saw Harry opening the door.

Worried that I'd be late, and completely drenched, I put the image of the suited figure out of my mind, racing up to the door with my badge.

It still didn't open.

Generally, at this hour of day, the building would be unlocked by one of three managers, Jolene, Gary, or Sam, the team lead.

On this particular morning, it turned out to be Jolene, a short, unfriendly woman with straight blonde hair. She didn't say a word to me, she only regarded me with a bored expression as she held the door open. She wasn't any better at mornings than I was.

Once through the cramped little security hallway beyond, I set about my morning preparations.

The break room had three refrigerators, one broken, one completely full of other people's lunch sacks, and it wasn't easy to find space in the third. I stuffed my mac and cheese in between plastic bags of unidentifiable substances, on top of a cheesecake tray that had occupied that same shelf for more than three weeks.

At other jobs, you'd have to remove my food at a certain hour to prevent the janitor from throwing it out. Not here.

As I warmed up my first cup of coffee of the day, I noticed a figure in a Hawaiian shirt and khakis sipping a steaming beverage as he stared out the giant glass windows. The rain pounded the glass in thick shadowy sheets that made it difficult to see past the street lamps in the parking lot.

"Boy, it's really coming down," the old man said. "Reminds me of that one time I went canoing on Lake Michigan. I was out in the middle and I took on so much water I thought I'd have to swim to shore!"

I just said "huh" and drank my coffee.

"The fish went crazy, I tell you what. The way they all rose to the surface like they did, you would have thought someone dropped a stick of dynamite down there."

I rolled my eyes. It was too early for me to tell stories, even if I could tell it in a clever and humorous way. I left him, marching into the call center.

I was practically the only one in the office. At six in the morning, the neatly arranged ranks of empty chairs and desks reminded me of a scene fron one of those movies where some giant weapon causes all of humanity to disappear. Kind of creepy.

As usual, Steve the I.T. guy was at a computer, monitoring call volume statistics and idling in a teleconference with hold music ripped from the _Adventures of Ben Casey_. I've heard that song so many times that I wonder why I'm not whistling that in my sleep instead of spouting gibberish.

Steve was overweight, his stomach sagging over his pants, but his hair and beard were well groomed.

Steve was a strange animal. For a brusque, silent type, the fact that he wore Star Wars shirts and occasionally showed up dressed in chain mail, like King Arthur on the way to a battle, made him kind of cool. If he wanted to LARP on the weekends, more power to him.

Still puzzling about the stranger in the tux, I sneaked over to the area in which I'd seen the weirdo waving around the clock.

For the most part, nothing looked like it had been touched. I saw nothing extraordinary about any of the desks or computers. In fact, nothing at all seemed amiss until I peeked into the manager cubicle I'd seen the stranger vanish into.

On the manager's desk, next to the phone, I found a tiny black triangular object marked with a curving scythe shaped symbol and a red flashing light. I stepped further inside the cubicle, reaching out to pick up the device.

Before I could touch it, I heard a voice shout, "Hey! What are you doing! Get out of there!"

I turned and saw the top of a shiny bald head. Looking down, I noticed it belonged to a squatty dwarf in a Hawaiian shirt. Vincent.

Vincent was one of my favorite managers, simply because he was a dwarf. Just seeing him handle his team and waddle around the office made me grin. I wanted to pick him up. I always had thought it a shame that I wasn't on his team.

Of course, grinning isn't the best thing to do when someone's pissed off at you.

"Sorry," I stammered, fighting down the smile. "I..."

I jerked my hand back, stepping away from the desk.

"Shoo!" the dwarf said, waving me away.

I quickly backed off, watching the little man as jumped up and threw his stomach over the desk, unplugging something from the computer.

I saw him stuff whatever it was into his pocket, then.

His face turned a bright red when he noticed I hadn't moved. With an angry glare, he growled, "Shouldn't you be logged into the phones already!"

"Right!" I stammered, hurrying away.

As I darted around a row of cubicles, I nearly collided with a fat broad in tight fitting clothes. When she turned around, her bottom portion looked like a rhinoceros being pressed through a canvas tent, her upper portion a lovely vision of a sumo wrestler in tight stretchy cotton.

I shuddered. To some people, the dress code was just a suggestion.

We glared at each other for a moment. She had on old man glasses and an ugly knitted hat made of yarn. Classy.

When she walked past me, it was like the Sta Puft Marshmallow Man stomping through downtown Manhattan. Slow, plodding gait that shifted her whole body to a forty five degree angle with each step, her arms swinging in wide spans to clear space in both directions.

I hurried to my desk, logged into the phone and computer, and took calls for two hours.

"Why my phone off. Why my bill so high? I promise to pay you next Saturday. I didn't know my account was charged off against my credit." This is what the conversations consisted of.

The rows behind me filled up with coworkers. Then I noticed a black man in glasses logging into the phone next to me.

Curtis.

Curtis was cool, but the way he talked to customers, I really couldn't figure out why they hadn't fired him. We're supposed to be getting payments for phone reactivations, not talking about sports, or preaching, or political scandals, which he got into after his third call.

"You know, I really think it's ridiculous what they're doing to him," he was saying to the customer. "Barring him from the team due to sexual misconduct. I mean, it's not like he did that on the field or the locker room. It was with his ex wife and that man. Granted they were both connected to the NFL, but what he does off the field really should be his business and his business alone."

I rolled my eyes and pretended I wasn't hearing this.

I took my break, got a cup of coffee, and returned to the phone.

Misapplied payment dispute. An argument about late fees. One payment. Lots of promises.

The calls were suspended for training, so I flipped through a pointless instruction module designed for sales and technical support, something that had no bearing on collections, then laid my head on my desk as I waited for everyone else to finish.

"Rough night?" said a voice behind me.

I groggily sat up, turning my chair to face the speaker. "I had insomnia."

"Take some Benadril," said a whiny sounding fat guy in the row behind me. "That works pretty good."

"Me, I take a shot of whiskey like this." Harry held up a couple pinched together fingers. "Mix it with orange juice or hot milk, and it puts me right out."

"What I do is get some hot juice or tea," said a voice to my right. "Take a cup of that and watch the Weather Channel for a few minutes, and I have no problem sleeping."

My two cubicle mates then got into a discussion about news stories, a badly concealed murder, the culprit's weak alibi, and some unsupervised kids dying from playing a game involving a plastic bag. Soon the topic changed to plans for the weekend. Harry said he got his truck fixed, and he was fishing at the lake, spurring a discussion about trophy catches.

I took my lunch and came back to find them still chewing the fat.

I suddenly noticed a strange new face in the office, an athletic looking forty year old woman with curly brown hair and narrow angular features. The woman had on a white shirt and black slacks, and carried a clipboard full of papers.

She was going down the rows, notating something or another, but I couldn't tell what. I typed a message into my Spark chat about it, but I couldn't get an answer.

I've learned to be cautious about what I say in Spark. I made some jokes in the chat that nearly got me fired. But I figured a question about business wouldn't hurt anything.

The silence got me to wonder if I were wrong.

At last, someone said that the woman was checking computer towers. They had to know which one went to which login ID, which seemed plausible, except she seemed to be looking more at our faces than our computers.

"Who is she?" I typed.

Another long pause.

"I think her name is Grace," said a fat guy in the row behind mine. The back of his chair faced me, but I could tell it was Max by the whiny voice. "I think she's a new manager."

"Grace Augustine," someone told me in a Spark.

"Funny," I typed. "She doesn't look much like Sigourney Weaver."

The other employee replied by saying he once worked with a guy named Fred Flinstone and he didn't look like his TV counterpart, either.

About ten minutes later, the "training" ended, and I was back to talking to customers about their bill.

I took my last break for the day, and as I was standing around the break room, my cel phone started ringing.

I hardly ever use my cel phone. I have few friends, so I mostly use it to pay bills and call the apartment office from time to time.

The number showing on the screen was oddly familiar. Guessing who it might be, I almost let it go to voicemail, but instead I pushed talk.

"Hola, jiefito. Es mio, su princesa tribu. ¿Aún tengandas mis chonies?"

"What?" I said.

"¿Mis chonies estaban en sus manos, sí o no?

"What's a chonie?"

She laughed. "So now we talk English?"

Reddening, I said, "What did we talk before?"

"Oh..." she purred. "I do not recall much talking."

I swallowed. "Who are you?"

"So now you ask me my name? After you grab me by the hair, drag me down to your little Indian campsite and rip my clothes off? Why didn't you ask me when you were busy smashing my face into that moldy carpet?"

The color drained from my face. "I'm sorry. I've got...mental problems."

"Don't be sorry," she said. "I like it rough. _ ¡Me encanta, animal salvaje!_"

I was unbelievably turned on, but afraid to mention it. Instead I ducked into a hallway, lowering my voice as I said, "Was I wandering around naked again?"

"No," she giggled. "You were in your traje de baño. I helped you remove it."

"Please, lady. Can you please tell me your name?"

"Why do you want to know it?"

"Because," I said, blushing furiously. "I want to know the name of the..." I cleared my throat. "The only person I've ever had sex with."

She burst out laughing. "You are a virgin?"

"Was, apparently."

"You working?" she asked me.

"Yeah?"

"Well then. Meet me este noche, jiefito. Hay una sorprisa para ti."

"Does..._su_..._sorprisa_ include a glance at your driver's license?"

"I guarantee that will be the last thing you will be wanting to be looking at."

"It kind of sounds like I've already seen quite a bit."

"Oh?" she said. "It does not sound like it to me! But I tell you what, mi jiefe poquito. you make me feel good like you did ayer, and maybe I tell you what you want to know. Maybe I don't. You find out. Princesa Tribu is waiting, _and she is very horny. Llegame rapido, jiefe. Hurry._" And she kissed the receiver.

She hung up, and I just stared at the phone.

It was from this disoriented state of mind that I bumped into the new manager lady as she retrieved a Diet Coke from a vending machine.

"Gapagwa!" she exclaimed with some irritation.

Instead of saying sorry, I found myself instead saying, "Kigo, bainep. Hua yipumcko."

What now? I thought. Am I suddenly fluent in two languages?

She smiled and nodded. "Mobmik! Viravo poiagutewe?"

For reasons unknown to me, I blurted something I else didn't understand, following it up with a confused "What?"

She only laughed and walked away.

Thoroughly confused, and thinking it were all a joke, I returned to my desk, too tired to fully understand what had just happened.

An hour later, and I began to wish I had fixed another cup of coffee, as my head kept drooping forward as I handled the calls, getting accused of being drunk a few times. I stood up to combat the fatigue, and I managed to make it to 2:30 without seriously botching a call.

Everything seemed fine as I marched through the now crowded office and got into my car, but when I shifted into reverse, I heard a crunch. I guess had been thinking a little too hard about _La Princesa Tribu y sus chonies mujados._

Shifting back into my space, I got out to check the damage.

I had just accidentally backed into a dirty black Trans Am with a license plate reading "SNAKER." A string of little skulls the size of ping pong balls hung from the car's rearview. The skull motif carried on through the seat and steering wheel covers.

I could see the handle of a gun poking out from beneath the passenger seat.

Uh-oh.


	5. Chapter 5: Loco Whitey

I saw a huge dent in my rear bumper, but the car behind me looked no worse for wear.

I looked all around the car, but it looked like I had done more damage to my rear fender than the other car. I saw a little blotch of discolored paint, but that was it.

No noteworthy scratches, dent marks or any other glaringly obvious signs of damage. Nothing important like headlights or anything were affected. The car needed washing, and the birds hated it. That's all I could surmise.

For awhile, I just stared at the bumper, trying to decide what to do.

I was certain that if I put a note on this Snaker guy's car, he'd find a way to turn a fifty dollar dent into a thousand. With a little clever turn of the phrase, one little scratch could be exaggerated to make it sound like I caved in his front end.

I couldn't even tell if that's what I hit anyway. It's pretty much like hitting a light pole and leaving a note telling it I'm sorry. Cheap Japanese cars.

On the other hand, if I said nothing, maybe he wouldn't notice.

I tried not to think about the gun under the seat.

And so I drove off, still puzzling over my mystery Indian Princess.

By the time I arrived at the apartment complex, I came to the decision that, if I were to meet this girl anywhere, it would be somewhere near that rock outcrop I'd woken up next to the other night.

But, I thought, that doesn't necessarily mean it's a good idea.

For about ten minutes, I just sat in my car, trembling as I thought about what to do.

While I had to know who this woman is, and establish rapport before she tries to sue for child support, I considered the possibility that she might `surprise me' in a way I wasn't prepared for.

Deciding the best thinking is done on a full stomach, I cooked some Hot Pockets in my apartment, then thought about it some more.

At last, I finished up, set my plate down, and marched off in the direction of that strange wooded area at the other end of the complex.

The moment I passed the stairwell next to that particular apartment building, a bony brown faced guy in a tank top and baggy pants pulled out a switchblade and slammed me against a wall.

He was about a foot shorter than me, but I was pretty sure he could kill me if he wanted.

"You fucking with my sister?" he said in that irritating half whisper I see gangsters do on TV.

"N-no," I blurted.

My assailant pressed the knife to my throat. "Don't lie to me, whitey. I know you fuck with my sister."

"What's your sister's name?" I ventured.

For my trouble, I felt the edge of the knife making its first tentative bite into my skin.

"Who do you take me for, whitey? Some kind of idiot? I find my sister running around desnudos, with bruises all over, and the first thing she talks about is some crazy cracker playing Indian with her in the laundry room. You're one sick fuck, you know that?"

I swallowed, trying to avoid cutting my own throat in the process.

"I can't disagree with you there," I said apologetically.

He took this as a joke and punched me in the stomach.

"I should kill you right now!" he nearly hissed through his teeth. "But for my sister I won't."

I sighed in relief, but that was the wrong thing to do.

I felt myself being pushed against the concrete again, one of his hands clamping around my throat like an iron band while the other pointed the knife at my jugular.

"You do not see my sister. You do not touch my sister. You do not fuck my sister again, or I slash your little white pencil neck. Comprendé?"

"Muy claro," I gasped.

He chuckled, probably at my Spanish, and sheathed the weapon. "Now get out of here."

He didn't have to tell me twice. I hurried back to my apartment as fast as I could, deciding to put Indian Princess as far out of my mind as possible.

The next morning, I woke up naked beneath a crude tipi made of fallen sticks from the complex, trash bags and piles of leaves. The only reason why I didn't miss work was because I snapped awake at four in the morning.

No panties this time, but apparently I had fashioned several crude wreath things out of found objects and laid them all over the apartment building in some strange ceremonial fashion.


	6. Chapter 6: Non Disclosure

My next work day started out ordinary and unremarkable. The sky looked normal, and nothing weird happened.

After I had parked in the lot, I checked the other spaces, but didn't see Snaker's car anywhere. Getting nervous, I waited for the doors to open, keeping a watchful eye for that black Trans Am.

When 5:45 passed without a sign of the vehicle, I could only sigh and walked into the building, going about my normal business.

Arguments about premium data charges and text messages. A thirty minute fraud call where the woman cried into the phone and refused to speak to the fraud department. A "why is my phone off" call. Etcetera.

I fell into the usual routine of setting up extensions on phone service, asking for payments, explaining bills, and informing people that their accounts were in collections.

I took a call from a woman who said that the phone account with her name and social security number actually belonged to her roommate, demanding that I call the roommate and make her pay, after I switched her phone service back on. I told her no, which resulted in it being escalated to a supervisor. Usual stuff.

About twenty minutes into this, I saw my corporate instant messenger flashing red in the corner of the screen, my boss Gary's name in the box. It was a private message. Private messages from the boss are rarely good things.

Swallowing, I read what Gary sent.

"Did you touch the Varvox yesterday?" it said.

I stared at the screen, baffled about what he was talking about.

Yesterday. I could think of only one thing.

I typed, "You're talking about that thing on Victor's desk, right?"

Pause.

"Did you touch it?" came the response.

I typed no.

Ten minutes passed without Gary sending me anything, so I closed the box, assuming we were done.

Figuring the lack of response was a good thing, I returned my attention to the relentless stream of phone calls.

Phone service restoration. Trying to squeeze payments out of customers who refused to pay anything.

"What's a Varvox?" I texted. Gary gave me no answer.

Since it was break time, I decided it a good time to check the parking lot for Snaker's car. It wasn't there. It was annoying to have to keep checking outside all the time like that, but it wasn't like I had his phone number.

When I returned to the building and got a cup of coffee, I found the strange woman seated at a break room table, typing something on a laptop.

Still confused about our exchange on the day previous, I tapped her on the shoulder.

"You stopped and spoke to me earlier," I said. "But it was all gibberish. I don't get it. Is this some kind of game?"

She just chuckled and shook her head. "If it's gibberish, why do you keep communicating to me with it?"

"Cute," I said. "But I'm not talking about English."

"Neither am I," she said. "And we certainly aren't speaking it right now."

When it finally dawned on me that our lips weren't forming English syllables, I backed away in horror. She only laughed and folded up her laptop, waking away.

My mind was full of questions and unrest, but there was nothing I could do about it. I finished my coffee and got back on the phone.

After explaining to yet another customer that their payment for phone equipment actually applied to their past due balance instead of actual phone service, I typed a message in the main employee chat room.

"Does anyone know what a Varvox does?"

Long pause. I figured the others were on other calls.

I did a phone reactivation, then sent someone else to customer service to change their calling plan.

"I don't know what you're talking about," someone with the handle MLarson wrote.

"Sounds like a brand of vodka," someone else wrote.

Another message said, "I think they were trying to say `Firefox'."

I saw Harry turn in his chair, replying to the message verbally. "Did you see the invisible man using it?"

"It sounds like one of those Avaya teleconferencers," Sam typed. "It's probably an external mic for a phone."

I wrote "maybe."

"Either that, or it could be a new type of mouse, or an external storage device."

Nobody else wrote anything.

A rude customer was serious entitlement delusions called in, smugly demanding his late fees waived for no good reason, so I put him on hold for over a minute. Asshole tax, I thought as he typed in the chat again.

"I saw this thing on Victor's desk. It was triangular and it had buttons on it. Gary called it a Varvox but he wouldn't tell me what it did."

Another long silence.

As it neared lunch time, and I was frantically typing memos on a previous customer's account while speaking to a new one about something equally complicated, I saw a light flashing on my monitor, this one reading GWarren.

"Log into AUX 4 and come see me," the message said.

AUX 4 is a code we put in the telephone to tell it we're busy and cannot take phone calls. Plus it tells payroll when you worked and when you took your unpaid lunch. When I was first hired as a trainee, I didn't use the AUX function at all, and some naive customer actually waited a full ten to fifteen minutes for me to pick up the phone.

Aux 4. Back office.

Great, I thought. What did I do now?

My mind ran over the possibilities. Did I mess up a call? Did I tell a customer the wrong thing? Did I mess up an account?

"I told you I didn't touch the thing," I typed. It was a stretch, but it was my only guess, considering his earlier messages.

"We'll talk about it," Gary replied.

Why the back office? I thought, but I knew it was no use trying to get answers from Gary when he was like this.

I tried to log into Aux 4, but a call came in and it was a long one about billing issues.

I told him I was stuck, but would go back to meet him ASAP.

The customer argued that she paid on time every month on time, and shouldn't be punished for it, when she actually paid her bills a month late,and had been paying a month late for over a year. It took ten minutes for me to get that point across to her, and still it ended up being escalated to a supervisor. Only then could I escape my phone and comply with Gary's request.

"Sorry. I'm done," I typed.

He replied, "That's fine. Come see me and Christina in the back office."

Christina.

That doesn't sound good.

Gary never involved the head department manager in something unless I did something that could possibly result in me being fired.

I cringed.

With my shoulders slumped, and my head low, I nervously stumbled to the dreaded corner office with the glass window and the square metal desk with the fake wood top, avoiding eye contact with the frowning supervisors.

My skinny African American boss was leaning against a marker board along the back wall, the fluorescents glinting off his glasses. Ordinarily Gary is cool, but this situation set me on edge.

Christina is a young, severe looking blonde with long hair. She was always well dressed. Gold necklace, turquoise inlaid silver earrings, tasteful business attire, sharp white blouse with a vest.

We never met, except in bad circumstances. I frequently got in trouble with her at the previous department for sending poorly worded e-mails to customers and businesses. After the department closed, we met again when she didn't like my employee chat messages. I promised her I wouldn't send anything unless I had to, but I thought questions about Victor's device were fairly innocent. Maybe not.

Maybe, just maybe, she intended to fire me for keeping my chat messages purely cold and business-like.

Gary waved at a gray swivel chair on the employee side of the desk. "Have a seat."

And so I plopped into the ergonomic padding, staring at the fake grain in the simulation wood desk top.

I glanced up at Christina's chubby white face for a moment to read her expression, then looked down again.

"Gary tells me you touched the Varvox."

I frowned, shaking my head. "No. I didn't touch it. I just looked at it."

A long pause followed this. I saw Gary and Christina exchanging knowing looks.

"And what did you see?"

I described it.

Another pause.

"What do you think it does?" Gary asked.

"I don't know," I stammered. "I guess it's some sort of...conferencing tool. Sam said it could be a storage device or a mouse. Is that why I'm in here? Why is that important?"

Pause.

"Just a moment."

I saw Christina march over to Gary, whispering something to him.

"Stay here," Gary said, and the two left him in the room.

I found it a tremendous relief that they were pulling me aside over something that nobody could logically fire someone about. The only thing that annoyed me was that my unscheduled break had to be done in the manager's office, where the coffee had to be purchased on the honor system, and I wasn't supposed to leave my chair.

I stared at the papers obscuring the faux oak surface; something about proprietary equipment, a disciplinary action form, and a handful of other threatening documents, deciding not to touch them for fear of making matters worse.

A sheet written in an unreadable foreign script tantalized me, but I resisted the temptation to pick it up.

The two managers re-entered the room with Gary looking a bit sheepish, Christina looking very cold and stern.

Christina's icy gaze bore straight through me as her mouth opened and words came out.

"At sprint we take our proprietary systems and software very seriously. We do not want this information leaking to our competitors, and for this reason we have kept all information about the new Varvox a secret from all entry level employees such as yourself. We don't want AT&T or Verizon learning about our new phone systems, so we found the best way to do this is not tell frontline employees about it until we already had it in use and in stores. Now that you have been exposed to the product, you present a substantial risk to the financial security of this company. Because of this, we're going to ask you to sign a non-disclosure agreement."

She pulled out a sheet of paper, sliding it over the table with an accompanying pen.

As I stared at the sheet for a minute, I Gary say, "The form basically states that you agree to keep any and all information about the Varvox a secret, and to not mention it to friends, family or (ahem) other coworkers, or face automatic termination and possible legal charges."

I could feel my face flush red. "How was I supposed to know I wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it?"

"It doesn't matter," said Christina. "We have the situation under control. So if you'd just sign and date this form near the bottom..."

I frowned at her. "Otherwise you'll not only fire me, but you'll also sue me?"

Gary sucked in his breath. "In a manner of speaking..."

"Only if you violate the terms of this agreement," Christina said with more finality.

"What do you mean, `in a manner of speaking'?"

"Well..." Gary stammered. "You won't need to worry about that if you don't tell anyone about the Varvox."

Christina glanced at Gary, then turned her cold stare back to me.

I stared at the terms with bewilderment. It seemed to be saying something about reporting negatively to other employers. "You want me to sign something that allows you to blackball me?"

"Again, it's only if you don't follow the terms of the agreement."

I eyed her with suspicion. "This doesn't seem legal."

Gary sighed. "Do you want this job or not?"

Christina crossed her arms. "You can either sign the paper, or we can walk you out the door right now. Technically you have breached confidential business security by disclosing it to other employees. That's not something you want on your permanent record when you're out job hunting."

Dead silence.

The tension ran thick as they tensely waited for me to sign the paper. I scowled at the table.

It wasn't fair, I thought. I felt like suing them, but I had no lawyer, not enough money to get one, and nowhere else to go. I simply couldn't afford to sue the second biggest phone company in America.

I grabbed the paper and signed.

Christina took the paper away. "Thank you. You may go now."

Gary looked at his watch. "Isn't it about time for your lunch?"

And so I walked out, retrieving my meal from the crowded refrigerator.

I didn't see "Grace" anywhere, and would not see her again until the situation with the fender bender eventually came to a head.

As I sat in the break room, eating some rice and a bit of fish from last night's dinner, I took out a piece of paper, writing a note to the owner of the Snaker car.

I found Harry standing in his usual favorite spot, by the window, with a plastic bottle of homemade tea in hand, staring out the glass at whatever wildlife that happened to go by the parking lot.

Without turning, he said, "Gary told me what that thing was. Sam was right. It's for conferencing. It's just a microphone or something."

"Yeah," I stammered, leaving Harry to silently sip his tea.

"See any more invisible men?"

I frowned. "No."

My anxious worry about Snaker must have been visible on my face, for then he asked, "Are you feeling all right?"

"Yeah," I sighed. "Maybe I'm just tired."

"I have a cousin who's into parapsychology. You know, studying ghosts. She got in the paper one time. I think she's even published a book about it."

At the moment, I couldn't have cared less. "Huh. That's interesting."

"It takes talent to photograph them, but she's really good at it."

I only said "Hmm", glumly stuffing food in my mouth.

Once I finished eating, I gathered up as much courage as I could, marching out the double security door in search of the Trans Am.

I looked high and low, but still didn't see it among the rows of parked cars. I saw a car that looked similar to it, but that one didn't look dirty enough to be the one, and the license plate was wrong, so I went back inside.

When I returned to my desk, I saw no new activity in the chat, save for the usual banalities like "$200 payment, $$$."

And so the usual grind resumed. Lots of promises, sporadic payments, and lots of phone activations.

Bills, payment disputes, some guy trying really hard to get account information he wasn't allowed to have.

I took my final break for the day, checking the parking lot once more. No sign of the Trans Am.

When I came back, I found everyone had been assigned a training module. Another lame Power Point thing that told you all about the features on a new phone they were selling, without any details about what that does on the billing end. Pointless.

I wasn't sure why this device was okay to talk about, but the other one would ruin my chances at getting a job forever. That being said, I didn't mention it to anyone for fear that their threats would be carried out. Instead, I just silently completed the module and read a book while my neighbors in the other cubicles chewed the fat.

When my shift ended, I gathered my belongings and walked out, checking the lot one last time.

At last I saw the car.

The moment I'd tucked the note in a secure looking crack in Snaker's window, I felt my face slamming against the hot metal hood, my arm twisted painfully behind my back.

I saw a white glint, then noticed something sharp pressing against my neck.

A brown hand jabbed a finger at my car.

"That's your piece of shit yellow Corolla over there, isn't it, motherfucker?"

I swallowed and nodded.

"You know, it was just yesterday when I was thinking, `You know, I sure as hell hope that that dumb bastard with the yellow paint job doesn't do something stupid like try to get away with leaving my front fender headlight all fucked up, especially since we're working in the same damn building.' Judging by that bitty ass piece of paper you stuck in my window, it seems that my preliminary assumption is correct."


End file.
